I think pair programming can be incredibly effective, and I don't mind doing it every now and then, but a company I've interviewed with states they pair program "95% of the time" (they're a consulting ...

In our company there once were multiple programmers, now i am the last man standing. I have inherited all the code and i maintain, rewrite, extend (,fix) it.
I always run into this behaviour that i ...

I carefully followed the "always write quality code, unless you're writing a prototype" advice during my career as freelancer and software developer. I was convinced pretty early that avoiding to do ...

How do I measure team productivity over time using consistent story sizes?
To take a simple example, if I can do a story every two days, then I can do five stories in a two-week sprint. By definition ...

I know the joel test, specifically #8, specifies the ideal working condition for programmers or "knowledge" workers is one where there is a quiet area to work in. I hope this isn't a loaded question ...

Our team of 12 is currently considering implementing a style guide. The question came up if long term productivity benefits outweigh the short term productivity loss as everyone adapts.
What has been ...

I don't know how to word this easily but basically the software I am writing has a ton of actions and I want to assign hotkeys to every one of them so power users can work super fast.
First off they ...

We all would like to work with good, easy to maintain code that follows best practices and design patterns. However, reality is far from ideal. After all, content on sites like The Daily WTF is not ...

In my job I deal with several projects at the same time (and who doesn't?). Sometimes I have to make changes to a project which I dealt with half a year ago or even longer. And it's hard to recollect ...

I suffer from adult ADHD. Sometimes I get bored with projects or work items assigned to me at work because they aren't particularly interesting. I end up inventing more interesting work and working on ...

I work in a company where there are Excel spreadsheets everywhere. As my colleagues are non-programmers, I'm sure they haven't contemplated that there might be a better/easier/more productive way of ...

As a software engineer, we are always eager to get effective tools to boost our productivity.
And in our daily work, we are often unsatisfactory with the existing tools and would like to have better ...

The company where I work has a very decent IT department, which provided almost everything we need from an IT department. Anyway because of the nature of the work in my department (not IT related by ...

I understand all the advantages of Daily Scrum and my team does it when we are working on stories.
But sometimes we just have bugs to fix for days, while we're waiting for new stories, and when this ...

I believe that in an ideal team, members should have different but complementary abilities. But is that true about software development teams?
As an example we are a small team of 5. We almost have ...

I am an advocate of commenting on source code and documenting software products. It is my personal experience and observation that working on source code that is rigorously commented has helped me in ...

I don't have any experience working as a programmer - I just code as a hobby so far. Some years ago, I heard a programmer say that I should focus on making my code just work despite being slow (it was ...

One of the differences between svn and git is the ability to control access to the repository. It's hard to compare the two because there is a difference of perspective about who should be allowed to ...

I ran into the following issue where a keyboard shortcut I was used to was no longer working in Ubuntu. That's just an example. For programming, this kinds of thing happens a lot, but it also happens ...

I had read an interview with a great programmer (it is not in English) and in it he said that "a great programmer can be as 10 times as good as a mediocre one" giving reason for why good programmers ...

I write a lot of (primarily c++ and javascript) code that touches upon computational geometry and graphics and those kinds of topics, so I have found that visual diagrams have been an indispensable ...